Silicon Prairie Takes Root In Chicago Area

Computer Industry Finds Itself At Home With Heartland Strengths, Stability

February 20, 1994|By James Coates, Tribune Computer Writer.

He noted that because of the technology thriving here, Chicago lately has fostered a booming venture-capital industry. People with new concepts can obtain financing here much as they can in Silicon Valley, which has become known as a center for high-technology venture capital, Filipowski said.

Thus, the success that Miller and Schwabe are enjoying for NEC in the world computer market is typical of the Chicago Silicon Prairie phenomenon.

The two men head two of NEC's most successful product lines in the huge North American market, Schwabe's NEC MultiSync computer monitors and Miller's NEC MultiSpin CD-ROM readers.

Their monitors, designed and marketed out of Wood Dale, dominate the desktops of hundreds of thousands of power users of Macintosh and IBM-compatible computers who decide they need more than the 14-inch screens that come with most machines.

Likewise, the NEC MultiSpin CD-ROM readers have become enormously successful as computer companies increasingly decide to equip their machines for multimedia software. Miller said he expects to sell more than 1 million of the readers this year.

Schwabe and Miller attributed their successes to a mixture of high-tech engineering expertise and heartland marketing know-how that has kept the products on the minds of buyers.

For the monitors, the technology involved making the displays flicker-free and flat, an engineering feat that won the company a long string of accolades in the trade press. For the CD-ROM readers, NEC developed machines that could read the data-packed compact discs twice as fast, then three times as fast, and now four times as fast as competitors' devices.

In both cases, the company officials said, the technology was promoted by strong marketing drives that allowed NEC's Wood Dale outpost to capture large shares of the two markets. NEC monitors are the largest-selling brand of third-party computer monitors.

In fusing sophisticated engineering with aggressive marketing, NEC is following a long-standing Chicago tradition, said Tom Beaver, vice president in charge of Motorola's microprocessor manufacturing and development (including the PowerPC that now challenges Intel).

Beaver noted that Chicago and vicinity have a tradition as a leader in consumer electronics, with long-established players like General Instrument Corp., Zenith Electronics Corp. and, of course, Motorola.

Motorola, Beaver recalled, was named for "motor Victrola" when the company produced the first radios installed in Detroit-built automobiles in the 1930s.

The company has become a major producer of cellular telephones, pagers and other wireless communication devices as well as of the computer chips that are the heart of the entire Apple Macintosh line of desktop computers.

The communications side of the computer industry has played a big role in creating a Silicon Prairie on the banks of Lake Michigan, Beaver said.

"With the local Motorola, AT&T and GTE presences alone, Chicago is the communications and message and information-processing capital of the world," he said.

As technology increasingly allows people to convert the sort of information that they formerly transmitted verbally over phone lines into the digital code understood by computers, the communications capital becomes a computer center, Beaver said.

One area where Chicago is emerging as a leader in digital technology is in the creation of multimedia CD-ROM products by companies like Kinesoft and ICOM Simulations in the suburbs and Imagination Pilots, a startup high-technology company in downtown Chicago.

Howard Tullman, chief executive at Imagination Pilots, explained that his company found Chicago an ideal setting to get the financing and to hire the required programmers for a project to put the "Where is Arthur?" line of childrens' books onto multimedia CD-ROMs.

"Sometimes, good old Midwestern stability has its value," said Tullman. "The people in California and New York sometimes get all caught up with bizarre games and weird ideas that just don't market well with ordinary Americans."

So while Tullman's more exotic competitors are doing things like producing pornographic CD-ROMs-Virtual Valerie, for example-Chicago-area companies go for the bread-and-butter heartland trade.

It was in quest of middle American audiences that Kinesoft's president Peter Sills chose Frank Capra's wholesome classic "It's a Wonderful Life" for his company's first project using CD-ROM technology to produce movie packages.

Using complex computer-compression technologies developed by his programming staff in Arlington Heights, Sills has put the entire movie on two CD-ROMs in a way that viewers can search the movie just like they might search an on-line dictionary.

By typing in Lionel Barrymore's name, for example, a user is taken to every scene in which Barrymore appeared.

Most Americans may have missed the quiet emergence of companies like Sills' on the Silicon Prairie, but the computer industry's leaders are well aware of the phenomenon.

When software giant Microsoft needed a name for the product that will replace the best-selling Microsoft Windows 3.1 graphical interface now used in virtually all new IBM-compatible machines, the choice was clear.